'Mr. Marmalade'

Is Noah Haidle's "Mr. Marmalade," which opened last night at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Laura Pels Theatre, the worst play ever written?

No. For that we would have to go back at least 30 years, to a Broadway flop called "The Leaf People." And then there is always "Moose Murders." It's a crowded field.

It is possible, though, that "Mr. Marmalade" is the worst-directed play ever. The director is Michael Greif, who made his name with "Rent," a musical that triumphed in spite of its tragic direction.

"Mr. Marmalade" is about a 4-year-old girl named Lucy and her imaginary friend, whose name is Mr. Marmalade.

The girl is played, very badly, by Mamie Gummer. Her attempt at impersonating a child involves speaking in a breathless squeak, which makes about two-thirds of her dialogue inaudible.

The friend is played by Michael C. Hall, an excellent actor who has just concluded five seasons as the mortician David Fisher on HBO's extraordinary series "Six Feet Under."

Hall should have taken a break. Though one can see why the actor might have been tempted by the part: It shows his range, from sadist to angel. But his presence in this sorry project is just unseemly.

The point of the play appears to be that even small children assimilate into their fantasy lives all the horrors that adults visit upon them and others.

Mr. Marmalade is an amalgam of all the mostly negative male characteristics that Lucy has noticed in her (now absent) father and other shiftless men in the life of her mother, Sookie (Virginia Louise Smith).

The adults are interchangeable to Lucy, and since the play is seen from her perspective, we get Smith as her mother, as a teenage baby sitter and even as a potted plant who is somebody else's imaginary friend (don't ask). Ditto the males, all played by Michael Chernus.

Lucy has a 5-year-old temporary boyfriend, Larry, played as a geeky weird guy by Pablo Schreiber. They have a food fight and play a vigorous game of "doctor."

Mr. Marmalade, who comes with an officious personal assistant named Bradley (David Costabile), complains about work, does drugs and slaps Lucy around, when he is not showing up in a pressed suit (worthy of David Fisher), apologizing with a big smile and a rose, and tidying up the place.

Director Greif does nothing to locate the character of Lucy or anyone else until the last 10 minutes of the play, when Lucy's mother shows up in a waitress uniform and we get an outside glimpse of their modest suburban home. Until then we're given no clue about Lucy's blue-collar sorrows.

The concept of grown-up actors playing children need not be as unbearable as it sounds: "Found a Peanut," an early play by Donald Margulies, used this premise in 1984.

But "Mr. Marmalade" is just an undercooked, unpalatable mess. Why was it produced?

Haidle, 27, is a graduate of Princeton and the Juilliard School, where he was a Lila Acheson Wallace playwright-in-residence. The Roundabout has given "Mr. Marmalade" a costly, though inept, production.

Haidle's shelf is already crowded with "emerging playwright" awards. This does not bode well for the art form.